Unfortunately, business rules are rarely thoroughly documented and traced [1]}, [2]}.
Even when that is the case, external documentation or traces often become out of sync with other artifacts, which makes source code the only artifact that can be reliably assumed to contain this knowledge.
This is a known open problem in software engineering and traceability [3]}, [4]}, [5]}.
A significant body of work has sought to reverse-engineer business rules from existing systems [6]}, [7]}, [8]}, [9]}, [10]}, [11]}, [12]}, [13]}.
Such approaches depend on developer involvement (e.g., finding the relevant variables) and assumptions about how the rules are implemented.
For example, a common assumption is that rules are always implemented as conditional branches in the source code [6]}.
However, these assumptions are not based on empirical evidence.
We argue that studying how developers implement business rules, identifying patterns and good practices, is important for advancing this field of research and improving software development practices.
